Take it up with this guy.
You might want to track down a TV series called “The Games”. It’s a mockumentary about the organizing of the Sydney Olympics, written by and starring Clarke and Dawe from the video.
I’ve seen it. One of my faves.
But whenever I see ‘million-to-one chance’, I can’t help but think of Discworld.
Now that’s the sort of thing I come to the 'Dope for. Thank you, @Cheesesteak. Logistics is amazing, isn’t it? We all depend on it, but most of us (me) don’t really understand what all is involved in keeping civilization moving.
As to the wind moving the ship, I hadn’t thought about how the side of a ship that size plus the wall of cargo stacked on it could act like a sail. What I was thinking was “that size ship laden with cargo weighs a fuckton, how could the wind possibly affect it that much”. Note I’m not saying that the wind couldn’t affect it at all, just that it didn’t seem possible that if it were under power it could be moved that much off course. I am not a sailor, though, and my days of calculating things like moments of inertia and force affecting mass are long, long past.
Big ships have…interesting handling characteristics. There’s actually a school in France where aspiring sailors can operate scale models of these big ships to learn how to deal with the various scenarios they may encounter in the real world. “Scale model” in this case means that instead of a 1000-foot-long vessel weighing thousands of tons and fitted with tens of thousands of horsepower, you get a ship that’s 40 feet long, is ballasted to maybe 25 tons, and has a 3-horsepower engine. The student is positioned on the model ship so that his eyes are where they would be, relatively speaking, on a full-scale vessel.
Weird things happen when big ships pass close by each other, or by specific underwater geography, or certain currents/winds, and these captains need to be ready for it because once something unexpected starts to happen, it’s very hard to salvage the situation. Here for example is a failed overtaking maneuver in a narrow canal (note how the slower vessel is drawn toward the faster one, resulting in a collision):
In the school, it’s “oops, sorry about that” and maybe apply some touch-up paint. In the real world, you lose cargo, sink ships, and kill people.
Here is how my silly mind works: I saw the picture and the first thing I heard in my head was “Somebody’s gotta go back and get a shit-load of dimes!”
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned here, but I just heard on the BBC that there is an older channel that (probably smaller) ships have been diverted to.
Can anyone show me where this older channel is?
Look north of the lake. It looks like there are two canal’s there.
ETA. I am not sure there is a second lane in the location the ship was stuck
Heh. When I was in college Memorial Drive in Cambridge, by the Harvard Bridge (which is near MIT, not Harvard) went under Mass. Ave with low clearance. Trucks would frequently ignore the signs. Their tops would get peeked back like a sardine can. Sucks for them, great fun for us.
It looks like there’s a bit of a traffic jam at the moment:
Thanks. I didn’t see it before.
I was told that P&O tankers and bulk carriers were barred fro passing within a mile of each other in deep water. This came after a collision off Cape Town.
I see people above talking about tugs pulling the ship. Pulling, where the tug is so much lower down than the deck of the ship would not be practicable.
They push instead - if you look at the side of a large ship (cruise ships?) you will see the, presumably reinforced, place for the tugs to push. They are clearly marked.
What do you mean “bomb that size”? Like someone filled every container on the MV Ever Given with explosives? I think that’s extremely unlikely, but the DWT of the ship is over 199,000 tons. So 10x as powerful as the Hiroshima blast.
I think a very small bomb the just sinks the ship and leaves it stuck in the canal would be worse.
I did find this video of the captain.
So did erysichthon. 
This picture was in an earlier-referenced article but I thought I’d post it directly because it’s such an amazing perspective on the magnitude of the task, showing the sheer size of that vessel compared to the figures on land and the big front end loader:
Actually they use a mix, strategically. Consider that pulling and pushing also applies a force rolling the ship slightly. This can be an advantage or disadvantage.
Also you are forgetting that a tug can be on a long line meaning the angle is not as severe as you assume. Also, look at the photo above. There is no room on the starboard bow for tugs to push.
Having seen the photo above I think the strategy will be to pull the stern off first - it won’t be so badly wedged - then take it slightly to port, then pull the bow out the way it went in. This means a key movement will be astern. You can’t push astern with tugs. You have to pull.
Finally, consider that immediately after the vessel comes off it needs to be controlled and having tugs on lines is useful for that. IME, one of the key things true salvage pros remember - but others often forget - is that once you get a ship off, you need to consider carefully what happens next. If you don’t, you can end up with the ship in other forms of trouble.
You have both, I hope, been amused by the 11-foot-8-inch bridge in Durham, NC. It’s been peeling trucks and the like for a good long while. They were able to raise it slightly not too long ago, but people are still getting peeled.